The Book of Longings: A Novel (33 page)

My uncle owned his father’s lucrative papyrus fields, the transactions of which were acutely boring—contracts, deeds, accounts, receipts. Mountainous piles of dullness. Fortunately, he still sat on the council of seventy-one elders that oversaw Jewish affairs in the city, which provided me with far more engaging documents. I copied a wonderful array of lurid complaints about pregnant widows, daughters-in-law found not to be virgins, husbands beating wives, wives deserting husbands. There was an oath from a woman charged with adultery who swore her innocence in such insistent terms it made me smile, and another from a rabbi’s wife claiming a male bath attendant had scalded her thighs with hot water. Most amazing of all was a daughter’s petition to give her own self in marriage rather than allow her father to do it. How dull Nazareth had been.

I wrote on the most beautiful papyri I’d ever beheld, white, close-grained, polished sheets, and I learned how to gum them together to create rolls twice as long as I was tall. Haran’s other scribe was an elderly man named Thaddeus who had sprigs of white hair in his ears and ink stains on his fingertips, and who fell asleep each day holding his pen.

Emboldened by his naps, I abandoned my work as well and resumed writing my stories of the matriarchs while he slept. I didn’t fear Haran’s sudden appearance, for he spent his days flitting about the city, if not attending council meetings, then business at the synagogue or Greek games at the amphitheater, and when he was home, we stayed clear of him, taking meals in our quarters. It was only necessary that I produce slightly more copies than slow, snoring Thaddeus. In this way, I composed the stories of Judith, Ruth, Miriam, Deborah, and Jezebel. I tucked the scrolls inside a large stone jar in my room, adding them to the others.

I spent the afternoons in our guest quarters, idling endlessly and fretting for my beloved, whom I pictured wandering about Galilee speaking openly with lepers and harlots and mamzers of every sort, calling for the mighty to be brought low, all of this in the presence of Antipas’s spies.

In order to distract myself from my fears, I started filling the time by reading my stories to Yaltha and Lavi. Yaltha had grown increasingly quiet and morose since our arrival, downcast, it seemed, over our inability to seek Chaya, and I hoped my stories might lift her from her misery as well. They did seem to cheer her, but it was Lavi who reveled most in them.

He appeared unexpectedly one day at our door. “May I bring Pamphile to hear your stories?” he said.

I thought at first he’d asked because of the flair I gave to my readings. In my effort to draw Yaltha out, I’d made little performances out of them, not dancing the stories as Tabitha used to do, but enlivening them with actions and dramatic articulations. My rendition of Judith slicing off the head of Holofernes had brought gasps from Lavi and Yaltha both.

“Pamphile?” I said.

“The pretty Egyptian girl,” Yaltha offered. “The house servant.”

I gave Lavi a knowing grin. “Go, fetch her and I’ll read.”

He dashed toward the door, then stopped. “I wish you to read the
story of Rachel, whose face was more beautiful than a thousand moons, how Jacob labored fourteen years to marry her.”

Yaltha sat in the elaborately carved chair in our sitting room, a perch she’d taken to occupying day in and day out, often with her eyes closed, her hands rubbing together in her lap while she wandered off somewhere in her thoughts.

We’d been caged in Haran’s house through the spring and summer, unable to visit the great library, a temple, an obelisk, or even one of the little sphinxes that perched on the harbor wall. Yaltha hadn’t mentioned Chaya in weeks, but I guessed that was who she thought of while musing and fidgeting in the chair.

“Aunt,” I said, unable to bear our helplessness any longer. “We came here to find Chaya. Let’s do so even if we defy Haran.”

“First of all, child, that’s not our only purpose in being here. We also came to keep
you
from being tossed into Herod Antipas’s prison. If we stay long enough, we should at least succeed at that. As for Chaya . . .” She shook her head and the sad, remote look returned to her face. “That is harder than I thought.”

“As long as we’re confined here, we’ll never find her,” I said.

“Even if we were free to roam the city . . . without Haran to point us in Chaya’s direction, I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“We could ask about her in the markets, the synagogues. We could . . .” My words sounded pathetic even to me.

“I know Haran, Ana. If we’re caught venturing beyond these walls, he will make good on his word and renew the charges against me. Sometimes I think he wants me to violate his terms so he can do just that.
I
will be the one imprisoned, and you and Lavi will be turned onto the
street—where would you go? How would you receive word from Judas that it’s safe to return?”

I went to sit on the leopard-skin rug at her feet, letting my cheek rest against her knee, and gazed sideways at a row of water lilies frescoed across the wall. I thought of the mud walls in Nazareth, the dirt floors, the mud-and-straw roof that had to be fortified against the rains. I’d never minded those humble things, but I couldn’t say I missed them either. What I missed was Mary and Salome stirring pots. My goat following me around the compound. And Jesus, always Jesus. Each morning, upon opening my eyes, it would break over me afresh that he was far away. I would imagine him rising from his mat and repeating the Shema, his prayer shawl draped about his shoulders as he wandered off into the hills to pray, and missing him would become so great that I, too, would rise, then lift my incantation bowl and sing the prayers inside it.

Sophia, Breath of God, set my eyes on Egypt. Once the land of bondage, let it become the land of freedom. Deliver me to the place of papyri and ink. To the place I will be born.

Knowing that we both prayed at the morning hour each day was like a tether binding us, but I lifted my bowl for another reason, too. I longed not only for him, but for myself. How, though, could anyone be born while quarantined in this house?

As I sat there, staring at the lilies on the wall, an idea came to me. I sat up and looked at Yaltha. “If there’s any reference to Chaya in this house, it could be buried somewhere in Haran’s scriptorium. He has a large upright chest there. I don’t know what it contains, only that he takes care to keep it locked. I could try to search through it. If we aren’t free to leave, I can at least do that.”

She didn’t respond, her countenance didn’t change, but I could tell she was listening.

“Search for an adoption transaction,” she said. “Look for anything that might help us.”

The next morning when Thaddeus’s eyelids thickened and his chin dropped to his chest, I slipped into Haran’s study and searched for the key that unlocked the cabinet at the back of the scriptorium. I came upon it easily, poorly hidden in an alabaster jar on his desk.

When I opened the cabinet, the doors screeched like lyre strings plucked wrongly, and I froze as Thaddeus roused a bit, then settled back to sleep. Hundreds of scrolls were stacked tightly into compartments, row after row, their round ends staring at me like a wall of unblinking eyes.

I guessed—correctly, it would turn out—that I’d discovered his personal archives. Were they arranged by subject, year, language, alphabet, or some mysterious means known only to Haran? With a glance at Thaddeus, I slid out three scrolls from the top left compartment and closed the cabinet without locking it. The first one was a certification in Latin of Haran’s Roman citizenship. The second implored a man named Andromachos to return Haran’s black female donkey that had been stolen from his stable. The third was his will, leaving all of his properties and wealth to his oldest son.

Each morning thereafter, I retrieved the key and removed a handful of scrolls. Thaddeus’s naps typically lasted slightly less than an hour, but fearing he might wake precipitously, I allowed myself only half that time to read, making certain to mark the outside of each document I’d completed with a small dot of ink. Long manuscripts of philosophy were mixed with letters, invitations, commemorations, and horoscopes.
Nothing, it seemed, was left unrecorded. If a wee beetle ate a single leaf off a papyrus plant in his field, he wrote a lament that required the sacrifice of
three
plants. My progress was slow. At the end of two months, I’d read through only half the documents.

“Did you find anything of interest today?” Yaltha asked one afternoon when I returned to our rooms. Always the same question. Of all the emotions, hope was the most mysterious. It grew like the blue lotus, snaking up from muddy hearts, beautiful while it lasted.

I shook my head. Always the same answer.

“Beginning tomorrow I’ll go with you to the scriptorium,” she said. “Together, we can go through the scrolls much faster.”

This surprised, pleased, and troubled me. “What if Thaddeus wakes and finds you poring over Haran’s documents? It’s one thing for him to find me with an unauthorized scroll—I can claim I have it by mistake, that it was misplaced. But you—he could go straight to Haran.”

“Thaddeus won’t be a concern.”

“Why not?”

“Because we will serve him one of my special drinks.”

I
ARRIVED IN THE SCRIPTORI
UM
the following morning with cakes and beer, a drink the Egyptians consumed at all hours as if it were water or wine.

I set a cup before Thaddeus. “We deserve refreshment, don’t you think?”

He tilted his head, uncertain. “I don’t know if Haran would—”

“I’m sure he won’t mind, but if so, I’ll tell him it was I who arranged it. You’ve been kind to me, and I wish to repay you, that’s all.”

He smiled then and lifted his cup, and I felt a paroxysm of guilt. He
had
been kind, always treating my mistakes with patience and showing me how to repair errors by cleaning dribbles of ink with a bitter fermented liquid. I suspected he knew that I pilfered papyrus for my own purposes, yet he said nothing. And how did I repay him? I deceived him
with a draft Yaltha had concocted with the aid of Pamphile and a sedative distilled from the lotus flower.

His oblivion was quick and miraculous. I dumped out the beer in my own cup through the window in Haran’s study, and when my aunt appeared, I already had the cabinet unlocked. We unraveled scroll after scroll, securing them with reading spools, and read side by side at my desk. Yaltha was an uncommonly noisy reader. She made constant vibrating sounds,
hmms
,
ooos
, and
acks
, suggesting she’d stumbled upon some stupefaction or frustration.

We read through a dozen or so scrolls, unable to find any mention of Chaya. Yaltha left at the close of an hour—that was all the time we thought we could risk. Thaddeus, however, went on sleeping. I began to stare at his inert form to be sure he was breathing. His breaths seemed shallow and too far apart, and I was vastly relieved when he woke, bleary, yawning, his hair splashed up on one side of his head. He and I both pretended, as usual, not to notice that he’d been indisposed.

Later, finding Yaltha back in our rooms, I said, “You and Pamphile must restrain yourselves when dousing his drink. Half the measure will do.”

“Do you think him suspicious of the beer?”

“No, I think him well rested.”

On a spring day, midway through the month the Egyptians called Phamenoth, Yaltha and I were sitting beside the pond, she reading Homer’s
Odyssey
, which was copied onto a thick codex, one of the more precious texts in Haran’s library. I’d brought it to her with Thaddeus’s permission, hoping it would fill her afternoons and distract her mind from Chaya.

Our clandestine hours in the scriptorium had lasted through the fall and winter. After the first month, Yaltha limited her visits to once a week
in order to ward off any suspicions Thaddeus might have—there was only so much beer we could bring him. Our efforts had also been slowed when Haran suffered a stomach ailment and did not leave the house for several weeks. Nevertheless, we’d recently finished perusing every scroll in the locked chest. We knew more about Haran’s personal dealings than we cared to. Thaddeus was fat with beer. And we’d discovered nothing that suggested Chaya had ever existed.

I lay back in the grasses and stared at shredded bits of cloud and wondered why Judas hadn’t written to me. It normally took three months for a courier to bring a letter from Galilee. We’d been in Alexandria for twelve. Had Judas hired an unreliable courier? Or perhaps something calamitous had happened to the courier along the way. It seemed possible Antipas had given up his search for me long ago. I dug my fingernails into the soft pad of my thumbs. Why had Jesus not sent for me?

On the day my husband told me he would take up his ministry, he’d leaned his forehead against mine and closed his eyes. I tried now to picture it . . . to picture him. Already his features had dimmed a little in my mind. It terrified me, this slow disappearing.

Pamphile stepped into the courtyard, bringing our supper. “Would you prefer to eat here in the garden?”

I sat up, the image of Jesus scattering, leaving me with a sudden, sharp aloneness.

“Let’s eat here,” Yaltha said, setting aside her book.

“Has there been a letter today?” I asked Pamphile. She’d agreed to alert me to the arrival of a courier, but even so, I queried her about it daily.

“I’m sorry, no.” She gave me an inquisitive look. “This letter must be very important.”

“My brother promised to send word when it’s safe for us to return to Galilee.”

Pamphile stopped abruptly, wobbling her tray. “Would Lavi return with you?”

“We couldn’t travel without his protection.” I realized too late that I’d spoken without thinking. Lavi had lost his heart to her, but it seemed she’d lost hers to him as well. If she knew the letter meant Lavi’s departure, would she conceal it from me? Could I trust her?

She poured wine into Yaltha’s cup, then mine, and handed us bowls of lentil and garlic stew. “If Lavi returns with me,” I said, “I’ll make certain he has money to buy passage back to Alexandria.”